Carroll Fife is a co-founder of the 501(c)(3) organization Moms 4 Housing, and the city councilmember of Oakland, California for its 3rd district since January 2021.
Carroll Fife is a co-founder of the 501(c)(3) organization Moms 4 Housing, and the city councilmember of Oakland, California for its 3rd district since January 2021.
As a teenager, Fife, the middle of three children, worked in Muskegon Heights, Michigan. Her grandfather was one of the first Black city councilmen. [1]
After becoming a parent, she settled in Pasadena, California and then moved to Oakland in 1999 to create a small private school which closed four years later. [1]
Fife has a degree in psychology from Holy Names University, a private school she attended as an adult. She worked as a paralegal before working for the community-based Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). [1] In 2017 she was named the interim director of the Oakland/San Francisco chapter of ACCE. [2]
Fife received national attention in 2019 as the co-founder of Moms 4 Housing, a group of Black mothers who occupied a vacant corporate-owned West Oakland home, advocating that housing should be recognized as a basic human right. [3]
In a 2022 interview, Fife told SFGate that homelessness in Oakland was directly due to "neo-liberal policies" and "race-blind policies" created by the "overproduction of market rate units and rapid speculation". In June 2022, the council unanimously approved Fife's plan to create a rent registry to make rental property ownership and historical rental price information available to the public. [4]
Fife won her 2020 election to the Oakland City Council, defeating the two-term incumbent by nearly 20 percentage points. [5] In 2021, she voted to use $17.4 million from the Oakland General Purpose Fund for violence prevention efforts. OPD saw the largest increase in funding in the Bay Area while crime subsequently increased in 2022, 2023, and 2024. [6] Was the Oakland Police Department defunded? No.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in January 2023, Fife, a Black woman, publicized the violent and racist threats she had received against her and other public officials. Fife told KQED news, "The only reason I posted it is because it’s gotten worse lately. Because this has been happening to me, honestly, pretty consistently since Moms 4 Housing". [7]
In February 2023, Fife was attacked by Vincent Williams III, the CEO of the Urban Compassion Project, in West Oakland. Williams sued Fife, the City of Oakland, the MACRO program and others. Ak was cited by the Oakland Police Department and charged with battery by the district attorney for keeping Williams away from the Councilmember. The Courts dismissed claims made by Williams and the criminal cases against all defendants were dropped. [8] [9] [10]
In November 2023, the Associated Press reported that Fife's resolution to call for a ceasefire in the Gaza war passed the Oakland City Council 8–0. The resolution had no legal implications as the Oakland city council does not govern Gaza. [11]
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